2013 Geodynamics ProgramEXPERIMENTS: Simulating The Earth In The Lab

Student Projects

Pre-generals students are required to carry out a research project related to this year’s theme - preferably something outside their current field of research. They will be required to write this work up in an 8-10 page report, due at our last class meeting. In addition, they will give a 12-15 minute oral presentation at the end of the course, reporting the results of their findings.

Some project ideas will be solicited from seminar quest speakers, WHOI staff and falculty and posted below in the first few weeks of the semester. Please notify this year's science organizers of your project topic.

1. Tracers of hydrous melting in subduction zones

Subduction-derived fluids induce hydrous melting in the mantle wedge. However, peridotite residues of hydrous melting could be essentially dry because water escapes with the melt. Here we propose to trace hydrous melting through the partitioning of fluorine (F) and chlorine (Cl), two elements that are very sensitive to the presence of water during melting (Dalou et al., 2012). The study will combine SIMS measurements on natural rocks and existing experimental charges, literature compilation on arc basalts, and experiments in the laboratory are also a possibility.

Supervised by V. Le Roux, N. Shimizu, G. Gaetani

2. "Mélange melting in subduction zones"

Recent models on subduction zones suggest intense mixing at the slab-mantle interface and transport of the mixed materials ("mélange") in diapirs into the source region of arc magmas (Marschall & Schumacher, 2012, Nature Geoscience, 5: 862–867). The envisioned experiments will use a high-pressure/high-T apperatus to produce melts from mélange rocks and determine their composition to test whether some types of arc magmas could be produced by mélange melting in the mantle wedge.

Supervision: Horst Marschall & Glenn Gaetani

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